Posted
by
samzenpuson Wednesday April 13, 2011 @03:25PM
from the getting-plenty-of-sun dept.

cylonlover writes "Google has chipped in a US$168 million investment in what will be the world's largest solar power tower plant. To be located on 3,600 acres of land in the Mojave Desert in southeastern California, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) will boast 173,000 heliostats that will concentrate the sun's rays onto a solar tower standing approximately 450 feet (137 m) tall. The plant commenced construction in October 2010 and is expected to generate 392 MW of solar energy following its projected completion in 2013."

I think the summary should have included the total cost. One could read it and come away thinking that Google was completely bankrolling the project, when this is actually just a fraction of the money that will be required to build it.

If you were buying a $600,000 house, could you justify buying a $70,000 car because it's a drop in the bucket? Google hardly has a majority contribution (plurality maybe? Haven't read the article...), but about 12% is a non-trivial contribution in my book.

$168 million sounds like a serious investment, until you consider that this thing is projected to cost $1.37 *billion*.

You a Chemist? I don't know what the hell kinds of buckets you use but mine tend to carry more than 9 drops;)

168 mil / 1.37 billion = a little more than 12%. I'd consider 12% of my salary or budget a pretty significant investment, and if I was taking a test I'd consider a question worth 12% of the grade worth a pretty significant investment in doing well on it.

I think the summary unfairly implied that this was a majority investment. 12% is, to my mind, a very small investment. But, drop in the bucket or not, it's still nowhere even close to the kind of investment that will be required to actually see it through. I think that needs to be clarified.

Actually, I wanted to correct this. $1.37 billion was just the loan guarantees it was given for construction. After researching it a little more, I found out that this doesn't cover all the actual cost. Actual construction cost is estimated to be more like $2.14 billion.

That's the amount of the federal loan the company got. Add to that Google's $168m, and add other investments, but they won't say what the projected actual cost is. And the effective generation rate of the ISEGS is about 15%, which takes into account darkness, cloudy days, etc. They say the output is 392MW, but you need to discount that to get the effective delivered capacity of 60MW. So if the cost is $1.5B then the cost per kW is about $25,000, which is way high. Nuclear plants are up to about $10,0

Wait, wait, wait. I was an engineer closely involved in a review of this project, and the BrightSource engineers were vehement in their protests against this kind of argument. I feel compelled to share their thinking.

This is NOT intended to be a 24/7 power supply. It is only a "surge" power supply, intended to produce (and sell) power when power is most needed: during the afternoon hours when things get really hot in LA and everyone starts cranking their A/C units. In fact, the heliostats are arranged to favor the afternoon sun -- if you look at the pictures, you'll see the heliostat is not a perfect circle. There are more mirrors on the east side of the tower, so that when the sun is in the west, more light gets reflected back onto the tower.

They openly admit they couldn't compete if they were trying to be a 24/7 power supplier. And that's not the point. They don't have energy storage (molten salt, etc.) to be able to keep producing heat at night -- that would be additional infrastructure to support selling power when there's a lower profit margin. They can sell power at a higher price when power is most needed, in the afternoons.

Others on the internet have accused this plant of being a "natural gas plant" in disguise, which is laughably wrong. The natural gas boiler is *tiny* and serves only to warm up the boilers faster in the morning hours.

A large part of the power demand in southern California is for air conditioning, so a power system that produces its power in the daytime works just fine for most of the demand. (Also, the local climate tends to be hot days but much cooler at night, unlike say the humid Southeast where it stays hot at night.)

Factually correct, however it is misleading. He compared the cost per kilowatt hour to nuclear, which provides baseload capacity throughout the day.

Power is not fungible through time. "Batteries" are of extremely limited use at this scale. Part-time, when the part of the time is during peak load, is an *advantage* at a given cost per kW, not a disadvantage (the disadvantageous part is already factored into the cost / kW).

For instance, if this one provides $25000 / kW at times when the demand for energy i

Wait, the total cost is then about $3.50 per watt? Christ, they should have just subsidized cheap panel purchases. If this kind of scale up can't create more economy than that, then this approach is not going to work.

The money would have been better spent on outfitting solar power manufacturers with solar cells, so people stop complaining about how solar panels are really fossil fuels. Some people just don't understand the difference between marginal costs (like fuel that is dug out of the ground), an

This difference means that, given a sufficiently long lived solar installation, the initial cost doesn't matter. You will make your money back eventually, and once you do, you have a free source of power.

The only problem is that most solar installations aren't 'sufficiently long lived'.

So 12.5 of these things would take about 182 square kilometers and produce the same power as Fukashima. Of course, Fukashima now takes about 1260 square kilometers and growing, so the solar farm seems pretty good against your choice of nuclear plant to compare...

How much will Palo Verde cost to decommission? How many years will the waste require cooling while providing nothing in return? Decommissioning the solar plant would require what, some long hammers, a couple bull dozers, bit of dynamite to topple the tower, some dump trucks and a few crews of workers going at it for a couple months?

What about ongoing maintenance? I have no data but I'm guessing a bunch of mirrors is a lot easier to maintain than potentially deadly fuel and waste. Easier of course means cheaper.

does that make it an easy target for terrorists (from, say, redmond) to hit with a dirty bomb?

The point of a dirty bomb is that it is dirty -- i.e. you want it to blow up in a place where a lot of people live and (hopefully) make them sick. Blowing up a dirty bomb in the middle of a desert where nobody is around to get sick seems like a waste of a good bomb.

As for whether it would be easy to blow up in general (dirty aspects aside)... perhaps you could blow up the central tower, but the mirrors constitute the bulk of the infrastructure, and they would be spread out enough that you'd need an awfully

Do you have any idea how big the Mohave is? You could fit several European countries in it. It's not even the largest, just the one with (IIRC) the lowest rainfall and cloud cover with bonus points for being the closest to the major CA population centers.

We have about 6 deserts in the US that could fit dozens of facilities this size with a minimal wildlife impact (they spread the concentric circles of mirrors out by about triple the mirror size). In fact I wouldn't be surprised if we could build mirror farms like this in rural deserts and end up with an area the size of France covered in mirrors. People really fail to grasp just how big the American southwest is.

My first thought was that the 392 MW would be at noon on June 21. The important figure is of course the average MWH it will generate per day/year.

I'd guess it'll have a hard time seeming significant compared with nuclear power. I was just reading about the new Indian nuke plant complex the Russians are building, which is expected to generate 62 GW...or about 150 times as much, day or night, sunny or cloudy.

GE has developed the highest efficiency, full-sized CdTe thin film solar panel ever reported; is building what its say will be the largest solar panel factory in the US; has made two considerable business acquisitions that support its solar endeavors and has taken 100 megawatts worth of orders for its thin-film solar panel products.... When at capacity, the new plant is supposed to produce enough panels per year to power 80,000 homes annually. GE currently estimates the facility will employ about 400 people

How come CERN seems to have money coming out their asses, to bang Large Hadrons together? Now, if they could just bang two Hydrogen atoms together, producing a butt-load of heat . . . now then we're talking!

You are not factoring in the money it cost to mine the uranium, transport the uranium, store the nuclear waste and decommission the facility. Not to mention the costs of all the Fukushimas yet to come.

So this ignored technology will never be cost competitive with nuclear? Focusing on construction costs is merely sleight of hand to get people to think other options are too costly -- like advertising a brand new BMW for $10k (fn1).

It is perfectly reasonable to look at the slow motion disaster leaking into the ocean in Japan and think, there should be other options. Projects like this solar plant are going to result in improvements to the technology so that by the time we get to building the 50th, it'll be a rock solid means of energy production.

As for economic decisions, who is going to pay the residents in a 20km radius around Fukushima for their stores, homes, businesses, and farms? Are your economic costs for nuclear power including the costs of something going wrong, of babysitting the spent fuel for a decade or so after the plant shuts down, for the damage caused by mining? Compare that to the worst thing this solar plant could do if it failed in the most spectacularly unimaginable fashion possible -- nuclear is way more expensive than you make it out.

fn1: Includes the body only. Engine, transmission, wheels, electronics, paint, wiring, seats, carpet, head liner, lights, and everything else available as an option at extra cost.

The whole plant (3 units) is expected to generate about 1.2GW at peak. That's about one modern nuclear unit.

Over a full day, a solar plant generates maybe 1/3 of its peak power. That's OK, though. For areas where air conditioning is the peak load, a solar plant produces max power just when it's needed. A reasonable near-term goal would be to get Southern California's entire air conditioning load (10 to 15 GW) onto solar power.

This is solar's big advantage over wind power. Wind power is highly variable,

Anyone know what the Return on Investment is for this? I mean, Beside the intangible "We're saving the earth" publicity... Sure they can sell some of it back to power companies, and perhaps gain some carbon credits... but I'm sure they'll also use it as power for a server farm. I have to believe there's some amount of time this pays for itself with any of those options, but the article is a bit light on those details.

Well, it depends on the ratio of the growth of costs of other electricity generation methods. The cost of generation for this installation is fixed over the lifetime of the plant, so its long-term cost is basically the cost of return on a conservative bond. Cost of a coal/oil/coal/nuclear powerplant depends on the future cost of fuel, the future cost of environmental remediation/wast disposal. So if oil keep going up in cost, this plant just gets cheaper and cheaper (relatively), but if it drops back dow

Bats [google.com] have it worse than birds, for some reason that's still not understood. Since bats are one of the most important insect predators, this means more pesticides are needed to protect crops.

Yes, and you'll note that said reply was in response to something comparing animal deaths by solar to animal deaths by wind. This is also known as a wandering discussion, and is usually truncated shortly after the mods show up with "-1, Offtopic" scores, but can be carried out for months once the story is off the front page.

Oh, God -- got to love an article that starts out talking about wind power by bringing up Altamont Pass. Altamont Pass was a *1970s* wind farm. It was built with very little study (unlike today's requirements), and if you wanted to design a rapor cuisinart, that would be the way you would do it. They built it in the middle of a raptor flyway with low turbines with fast-spinning blades and a tower structure that encouraged birds to try to land on them. Comparing Altamont Pass to modern wind farms is just absurd. Despite them generating a tiny fraction of our wind power, Altamont and a couple other old farms cause over 80% of wind-related raptor deaths.

Then they bring up the American Bird Conservatory. The American Bird Conservatory, like the Audubon Society, supports wind power [abcbirds.org] when it's designed with birds in mind. The very paper that ABC cites for their numbers ("A Summary and Comparison of Bird Mortality from Anthropogenic Causes with an Emphasis on Collisions") states "The high level of mortality associated with the Altamont wind plant has not been documented at newer wind plants constructed at other sites." The paper's conclusions are amazingly *supportive* of wind turbines (noting, for example, that wind turbines average 1.5 bird fatalities per year, while communication towers average 8.1). They come up with a figure of 3.04 bird fatalities per MW per year for wind power. They estimate that wind power killed 20-37k birds per year as of the 6.4GW installed capacity as of 2003 (compared to the 500M-1B birds killed by anthropogenic causes alone). ABC's "1 million birds" number is nowhere in the first paper that they cite [abcbirds.org]. One can only conclude that they did some crazy extrapolation which was heavily biased by Altamont and other early wind farms which did not consider birds in their designs and used older, fast-turning blades. They also mention another paper by FWS, but fail to give a proper reference to it; I searched the FWS's site and can find nothing to back it up.

That whole WSJ article is based on a big lie -- that only wind power gets an exemption from bird kills. In the US, cars kill 60-80m birds per year, with more from planes and trains. 100m to 1b birds in the US per year die from window strikes. The number for US high tension lines is roughly 130m. For communication towers, the estimate is 4-5m (and rapidly growing). 67m are estimated to die from pesticides. And on and on. How many of these death sources do you think are getting sued?

Yes, because it's a sensible, rational line of thought that looks at the picture as a whole. It is totally unsurprising to me that it can be fitted to almost any discussion that gets media coverage, generally because the media (or people with an agenda like anti-nuke/anti-windfarm/anti-healthcare etc) like to go for sensationalist reporting and disinformation. It's no wonder that defensive rhetoric from proponents of the various targets of this propaganda is broadly similar in style.

And if you read it, it says 81% of the deaths were because of birds flying into the structure (broken mandibles), apparently mistaking mirrors for blue sky. There were 13 birds total that got singed because of entering the "standby points", patches of sky, where mirrors are focused when NOT in use. Simply dispersing these focus points solves this problem.

Your average flat roadway kills more birds in 6 month than this entire facility in 3 years.

That's 40 weeks, not 40 months, and because of the possibility of scavengers removing carcasses, the rate is more like 100 birds per year. The authors also warn that larger facilities may result in a nonlinear increase in the number of bird deaths because of the increase in scale.

If you had read the PDF, you would know that it was swallows that were the type of birds that were burnt. While I recognize that the Audubon study is necessarily flawed, not considering the possible beneficial impact on the birds' environment due to the plant, I do believe that their observations are more reliable than your purely anecdotal recollection.

> I wonder what would happen to the birds who fly into the beam near the focal point

The question to ask is whether this would impact birds more or less than ecosystem-wide acid rain from a coal plant? I have no patience for people crying about largely ephemeral bird impacts from wind or solar power, but aren't bothered at all by the much bigger and well documented bird killer: cars.

I have no patience for people crying about largely ephemeral bird impacts from wind or solar power, but aren't bothered at all by the much bigger and well documented bird killer: cars.

Change one letter and you get an even worse threat: cats. From the New York Times [nytimes.com], quoting the relevant section because of the paywall:

The American Bird Conservancy estimates that up to 500 million birds are killed each year by cats — about half by pets and half by feral felines.... By contrast, 440,000 birds are killed by wind turbines each year, according to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, although that number is expected to exceed one million by 2030 as the number of wind farms grows to meet increased demand.

So, if you're opposed to solar and wind power because of your concern over birds, you'd better not be someone who lets your cat go outside.

The question to ask is whether this would impact birds more or less than ecosystem-wide acid rain from a coal plant?

What if it kills one species at a significantly higher rate than others? "Oh, don't worry, it only kills dodos and giant moas!".

I have seen articles mentioning a sudden decrease in insectivorous bat populations that seems to be caused by wind farms. (I know, TFA is about solar, not wind power, but it's all related to "alternative" energy).

For some reason, a few bat species are much more sensitive to wind turbines than other flying animals, and those species are important economically because they eat insect

I understand your point, but "selective killing" is also known as "natural selection". As long as you don't deploy too much too quickly, they'll adapt. It makes sense to keep an eye out for some species that is unusually vulnerable and needs our active protection, but unless there's an actual credible threat, we ought not to hold up this technology dreaming up "what ifs" when the ones we're using now *are* doing massive damage.

Probably death. Same as would happen to a bird that flew into the outflow of the stack of a coal burning power plant. Or chopped up in the blade of a wind turbine. Or sucked up the chimney of a solar convector and ground up in the spinning turbine. Or blown away by the shotgun of the custodian of a solar panel installation for crapping all over his solar cells. For nuclear, I guess it might smack into the side of the cooling tower and die.

the truth is that *half* of all birds die each year. They will do this with or without wind or solar power. get it through your head, bird deaths by technology are always negligible, because nature is very cruel. anyone who frets over birds is a fool to whom prosperity has given too much time to waste on frivolity.

I wonder what would happen to the birds who fly into the beam near the focal point. Or would there be enough thermal convection signals there to scare them off?

If this is in the middle of the desert, I doubt that there would be a high concentration of birds, largely due to the lack of water. I'm not saying that there would be no birds, but surely this ecosystem couldn't support a large population. On the whole, I would think that the ecological consequences of putting solar plants in the desert would be relatively small, especially compared with say, cutting down the rainforests, eutrifying coral reefs, draining wet-lands, or suburbanizing large tracts of agricu

At Solar One, there were 13 birds that died that way in a 40-week study period. Most bird deaths at Solar One were collisions with the heliostats, nor burning. And, to be quite blunt, *some* birds are going to collide with anything you build. Birds die in collisions with rocks and trees, too (and *tons* die in collisions with our other structures -- power lines, windows, communications towers, etc).

Solar One was believed to be unusually attractive to birds because it was cited in the desert near an irrig

> There should be more than enough energy in the Sun to power their servers.

Can we just go ahead and say there is more than enough energy in the Sun to power their servers? I know all the epistemological concerns about truthiness, but I don't think most of them really apply here...

Also, does anyone know whether Google is investing or we are? How much of a tax benefit do they get from this?

It's so tall so they can use more mirrors and get more juice out of it. If it was at ground level, maybe a single ring of mirrors could direct light at it. If it's at 20', maybe two or three rings. When it's way up in the sky, you can get many rings of mirrors with a direct line of sight to the target.

They never stop to think about how much energy we actually need and compare it to how much energy can be captured by the green efforts. Unfortunately, there is a HUGE gap between those two numbers and no amount of "good faith" will close that gap.

Covering 2% of the uninhabited portions of the Sahara with PV cells would supply all of the planet's power requirements.

There's just the tiny problem of getting the power from where people don't live to where they do live. But hey, it's just wires, right? How hard could it be to build an 8000 mile transatlantic 1000GW power cable?